Copy the resulting output to your SD card and remove the “.patched” extension

Upgrade firmware from D5100 menu, as per the normal Nikon instructions

This should not brick your camera, but if it does I and the other Nikon Hacker team members will not have/take responsibility for any damages or liability. I have this firmware on my camera, and have taken a 25 minute video with it, but result may vary. Also damages that may occur due to camera operation times longer than specified by original manufacturer are your responsibility.

The Nikon Hacker forums is the place for discussing this patch, future patchs, or just to get involved.

We would like to invite any interested developers to help progress the firmware decoding process.

Soon we will be releasing the same patch for D3100 and D7000 camera’s but we have not tested these patches at all, so we are looking for VERY KEEN Alpha testers to try it out these changes. Contact me directly (simeon@simeonpilgrim.com) if you are interested and don’t mind possibly bricking your camera. If you don’t know what bricking means, don’t apply.All three tested and released.

I’ve found the memory location of the video recording limit (20 minutes on the D5100) and change it to 1 minute to allow for faster testing.

Here’s a really exciting video where is stops record after 1 minute with no user involvement.

[Update 40 minutes later]

The D3100 10 minute limit has been located, and the D7000 20 minute limit has also been located.

[Update 30th March]

Here’s a screen snap of a 25:59 minute video (1080P 30fps @18mbps) I just recorded on my D5100. At lowest quality settings (424 30fps @4mbps) it says I can record 59minutes of video, so I assume the it doesn’t display hours because 1h 59m @4mbp is 3.5GB which is around the size of my ~26m video.

As compared to the DSLR firmware the XOR pattern is different, but using knowledge from the D5100 firmware, I made very quick progress getting past the first two XOR layers, the third was a little tricky.

Then yesterday, I got an email from Петр Кудинов that showed where in the D5100 firmware the XOR tables were stored. With this new insight (that they were stored verse calculated) I proceeded to search for what I had already found of the V1 XOR pattern in that firmware, and struck gold.

Here is the firmware based patterns used to decode the V1 and J1 firmware:

Of interest is that the file is packaged the same as the newer DSLR firmware files, but that the A firmware is the larger file, while the B firmware is tiny.

I have no plan to start work on a J1/V1 firmware hack presently, as the D5100 work is all occupying, but people are welcome to come over to the Nikon Hacker forums, and discuss this work if they would like to progress it, or help with the DSLR work.

[Update] The A firmware does not appear to be a Fujitsu FR CPU like the DSLR are.

Also there are references to “SANYO” and “SANYO Digital Camera” in A firmware, how very strange Nikon.

[Update: 25th March – Thanks to Петр for pointing out that I had a row missing from table three due to cut’n’paste errors]